“All our names are pseudonyms,” the sheikh told the schoolteacher. “They have no value, and you may therefore call my son whatever you like, but knowing that his name and your name and the names of everyone else are one. Call him Adam if you like, or Yunes or Izz al-Din or Abd al-Wahid or Wolf. . Why don’t we call him Wolf? Now there’s a name that never came to mind before!”
You told your relatives you only discovered the wisdom of your father’s words during the revolution. You were the only sacred warrior, and later the only fedayeen fighter, who wasn’t obliged to take an assumed name. You used all your names, and they were all real and all assumed at the same time.
I brushed against the essence of your secret, master, and understood that truth isn’t real, it’s just a matter of convention; names are conventions, truth’s a convention, and so is everything else.
When your relatives left your house, I asked you for the truth and you said you’d been telling the truth. Listening to you, I’d thought you’d been making the story up as you went along, perhaps to make yourself even more mysterious, but you assured me you’d told them the truth and that to this day you still didn’t know your real name. Then you told me the men were your relatives from Ain al-Zaitoun and lived in the Ain al-Hilweh camp and had come to invite you to be the head of an Asadi clan association they’d decided to form, and that the business of the names was the only thing you could think of to make them drop the idea. “Names and families and sects have no meaning. Go back to Adam,” you told them as they left. So they left with gloomy faces. They’d wanted you to be head of the association because you were the family’s only hero, but as you were pouring the tea and stirring in the sugar you said, “There are no heroes. We all come from Adam, and Adam was made of mud.”
Come with me then, Adam, to your hospital room. There’s only one small window, which is covered with a metal grille like in a prison cell. The yellow — or sometime-yellow — door opens onto the corridor, from which comes the sharp smell of ammonia. Why the smell? Zainab says it’s to kill germs, but I’m convinced there are germs nesting in every cranny here. That’s why I bought us some cleaning supplies and clean your room every day. I wipe it down with soap and water, making sure that the smell of the soap gets into every corner. But no matter what I do, the smell of ammonia seeps back in and threatens to choke us. I thought of washing the corridor at night but gave up on the idea since it would be impossible to clean the hospital on my own, and everyone else seems to be used to the smell.
We’re leaving your room now for the corridor, where you can see rooms just like yours on both sides. But you are the only patient with a private room. Why this special treatment? That’s something I won’t go into. You think you’re here because they respect your history, and that’s what I tell myself too so I can put up with the situation. The truth, however, is very different.
When they brought you here, Dr. Amjad threw up his hands and said, “There is no power and no strength but with God.” Everyone dealt with you as though you were dead so they didn’t allocate you a room. Zainab understood you were to be left in the emergency room until you died — they left you lying there and went away. When I saw you in that state, with the flies hovering around you as though you were a corpse, I rushed to the doctors’ room, put on a white gown and ordered Zainab to follow me. She didn’t. Zainab, who throughout the war used to tremble at my orders, looked at me with contempt when I told her to prepare a room for you.
“No, Khalil. Dr. Amjad said to leave him.”
“I’m the doctor and I’m telling you. .”
The bitch! She left my sentence hanging in the air and turned her back and went off. So I stayed with you on my own.
You were primed for death — lying on the ground on a yellow foam pad and shivering. And the flies. I started shooing the flies away and yelling. I left you and went in search of Zainab, ordered her to follow me, and went back to you. Even Amin, the young man in charge of the emergency room, had disappeared. I became obsessed with finding Amin. Where was Amin? I started yelling for him, and then a hand came from behind and covered my mouth.
“Shush, shush. Snap out of it, Khalil.”
Dr. Amjad covered my mouth with his hand and dragged me to his examining room on the first floor, where he explained to me that Amin had disappeared and started telling me a strange story about the killing of Kayed, the Fatah official in Beirut, and the Kurdish woman, and the car, going into an exhaustive analysis of the political assassinations that had taken place recently in Beirut.
You remember Kayed.
He was quiet and gentle and brave — you don’t know that he’s dead. No, you should know — Kayed died two weeks before your stroke. He was the last to be killed. Is it true he married a Kurdish woman before he died? And if he did marry her, why did he make a date to meet her at Talet al-Khayyat near the television building? Who makes an appointment with his own wife to meet on the road? And where did his new Japanese car vanish to?
“They buy luxury cars instead of spending money on equipping the hospitals,” said Dr. Amjad. “The Kurdish woman stole the car. She was a spy and inveigled him into meeting her and they assassinated him. And it seems Amin had something to do with the affair.”
Amjad was speaking, and I was trembling.
Amjad was telling his stories, and you’re prostrate down below.
Amjad was analyzing Kayed’s killing, and when I tried to get in a word his hand would come and cover my mouth.
When we’re puzzled we always say, “Cherchez la femme!” and the problem is soon resolved. I’m convinced this Kurdish woman doesn’t exist but is a figment of the young Iraqi who calls himself Kazem.
Do you know Kazem? He was Kayed’s personal bodyguard. He came by twice to see you, claiming he wanted to see how you were doing. But he didn’t know you. He came to clear his conscience; I’m sure he was involved in the assassination. But why would he come to visit me? I have nothing to do with all that. It’s true, Kayed was my friend, but I wasn’t his only friend, why choose me to tell the story of the Kurdish girl to? Did he want to get me involved? Or maybe he’s part of the plot against my life. Does he know Shams’ family? Did he come to check the place out? I don’t want my imagination to gallop out of control because it has nothing to do with me, and Kazem has immigrated to Sweden. He said he was waiting to get refugee status but I didn’t sympathize, and I made sure he understood that. Then he stopped coming to see me and we were finally free of him.
I know, but I haven’t told anyone. The girl that Kayed loved wasn’t Kurdish, she was a Jordanian from Karak, a student at the American University in Beirut studying engineering. Kayed did love her. I met her with him a number of times. She was tall and fair and had mesmerizing eyes. They weren’t large like the eyes we usually describe as beautiful, but they were mesmerizing. And her name was Afifa.
She smiled as she introduced herself to me: “An old name that isn’t used much now.” She said her father, who’d been living in Beirut for twenty years, had named her Afifa after her mother, who was living alone in Ma’daba, and that she’d discovered that her uncle on her mother’s side was a priest named Nasri who lived in Deir al-Seidnaya near Damascus and painted beautiful icons. Her eyes watered — no, they didn’t water, but they had something of that watery blue in them. Kayed loved her and said she bossed him around: “People from Karak are always bossy.”
There was no Kurdish woman. Kayed was in love with a girl from Karak and all his friends knew about it, but that wasn’t why he was killed. It’s true that after falling for Afifa he abandoned many of the security precautions that Fatah officials in Beirut had to take in the wake of the decision to liquidate the Palestinian political presence in the city, but his death had nothing to do with love. It was connected with something else, and I don’t think the Israelis had anything to do with it.